Programme administration is a relatively neglected issue in the analysis of disincentive effects of unemployment benefit systems. We investigate this issue with a field experiment in Hungary involving random assignment of benefit claimants to treatment and control groups. Treatment increases the...

Government and researchers use school performance measures such as contextual value-added to claim that giving schools autonomy from local authority control produces superior pupil performance in GCSE examinations. This paper explores the extent to which inferring causality between autonomy and...

This paper considers the problem of parameter estimation in a model for a continuous response variable y when an important ordinal explanatory variable x is missing for a large proportion of the sample. Non-missingness of x, or sample selection, is correlated with the response variable and/or...

Research on educational and occupational achievement of immigrants in Europe has mainly followed an assimilationist approach, focused on comparisons with natives or other immigrant groups (see for example Heath & Cheung 2007). However, this may not be at all the perspective that migrants...

Streaming (grouping pupils according to a measure or conception of overall ability for most / all teaching) has greatly increased in prevalence among English primary school children since the turn of the century. Evidence indicates that streaming may disadvantage children in lower groups and...

The UK Department for Education (DfE) calculates contextualised value added (CVA) measures of school performance using administrative data that contain only a limited set of explanatory variables. Differences on schools’ intake regarding characteristics such as mother’s education...

This paper uses a unique data set from 5028 primary school children in rural India to examine whether the demographic interactions between students and teachers influence student outcomes and whether social distance between student and teacher exacerbates gender, caste and religious gaps in...

Methods. Sequence Analysis supported by Event History Analysis. Key Findings. Despite only 12 years separating both cohorts, the younger 1970 cohort exhibited very different patterns of housing including a slower progression out of the parental home and into stable tenure, and an increased...

Performance targets are ubiquitous in all areas of an individual's life such as education, jobs, sport competitions and charity donations. In this paper I assess whether meeting performance targets in tests at school has an effect on students' subsequent behaviour. This is helpful to test...

We show that children who are born at the weekend or just before are less likely to be breastfed, owing to poorer breastfeeding support services at weekends. We use this variation to estimate the effect of breastfeeding on children’s development for a sample of uncomplicated births from...